Harvard has a brilliant plan for fixing America's schools

Students
at Harlem Success Academy, a free, public elementary charter
school in New York.Chris
Hondros/Getty Images

The best school is the one that teaches kids effectively
while also grooming them for life as capable adults.

According to Harvard University professor Paul Reville, these
schools are few and far between. Many need a lot of outside
help to fulfill their mission of holistic development.

That's why Reville and his faculty at Harvard's Graduate School
of Education are launching By All Means, a national
program that, over the next few years, will help schools in six
cities across the US deal with specific local challenges that
hinder students' success.

Instead of making schools shoulder the burden of systemic
inequality, in other words, By All Means will recruit the entire
community to pitch in to level the playing field.

A community whose main public school sees a large homeless youth
population, for example, could work with a local shelter to help
kids complete assignments. A school without that support network
would be forced to deal with the problem on its own, taking
away from other responsibilities.

The six cities are: Oakland, California; Louisville, Kentucky;
Providence, Rhode Island; and the Massachusetts towns of
Somerville, Newton, and Salem. Reville expects each one to face a
unique set of challenges, whether it's, say, a lack of medical
care in Oakland, a lack of technology access in Providence, or a
homeless youth population in Salem.

"Communities have a tremendous amount of resources to bring to
the table in terms of meeting the challenge of educating all kids
to high levels," Reville tells Tech Insider.

To implement the system, Harvard will hire consultants in each of
the six cities to act as liaisons between the local mayor, the
school superintendents, teachers, and parents. The group of
community members will be known as a "children's
cabinet." Over the course of the multiyear project, the
cabinets will convene at Harvard five times to report on the
health of their local programs.

Reville's greatest hope for the project is that it gives clear
data on the strength of community involvement in education. "In
the course of doing that, we'll help propagate some other success
stories across the country" he says." And we will have identified
some policy work we'll need to do to eliminate the barriers."

One glaring example of those barriers is a startling and
well-documented trend known as the "summer setback." Kids
from wealthier families prize education and enrichment during the
summer, sociologist Annette Lareau notes in her book
"Unequal Childhoods," while poorer families tend to value
free, unstructured play.

As a result, kids from well-off families retain more of their
education come September, and each summer the knowledge gap
between the two socioeconomic classes grows, thereby affecting
overall achievement.

Reville wants By All Means to make summer education more
accessible for low-income families.

"Instead of treating access to summer learning an accident of
birth," he says, "you treat it as a critical part of a public
education and, therefore, an entitlement." That means offering
free or subsidized programs that exist outside of normal summer
camp, so lower-income kids can keep both their bodies
and minds active.

The cities themselves will be responsible for determining what
their program will look like. If all goes well, By All
Means will follow up its inaugural run with a second group of
forward-thinking cities in the coming years.

"This is an iterative process. We don't expect to build new
systems overnight," Reville says. "But we expect to learn a bunch
of lessons that then take us one step up the mountain, and then
we establish a new base, and we work from that base as we advance
forward."